2001 ‘你那邊幾點’ Directed by Tsai Ming-liang
When a young street vendor with a grim home life meets a woman on her way to Paris, they forge an instant connection. He changes all the clocks in Taipei to French time, as he watches François Truffaut's Les 400 Coups; she has a strange encounter with its now-aging star, Jean-Pierre Leaud.
Et là-bas, quelle heure est-il ?, What Time Is It Over There?, Futatsu no toki, futari no toki, Ni na bian ji dian, ¿Y allí qué hora es?, Que Horas São Aí?, Paljonko kello on Pariisissa?, Ti ora einai ekei?, És ott hány óra van?, Futatsu no toki, futari no jikan, ふたつの時、ふたりの時間, Która tam jest godzina?, Vad är klockan i Paris?, Qi dao si bai ji, Che ora è laggiù?, ¿Qué hora es?, 你那边几点, A Hora da Partida, 거긴 지금 몇시니?, А у вас который час?
France
Cannes Film Festival
Czechia
Karlovy Vary International Film Festival
Canada
Toronto International Film Festival
USA
New York Film Festival
South Korea
Pusan International Film Festival
France
Canada
Czechia
France
South Korea
USA
Hsiao-kang speaks to his fathers ashes assuming that his ghost still clings to its edges with his celestial fingertips, giving him a much needed warning when they are about to enter a tunnel. His father is soon to be reincarnated as mice and fish and walls and maybe even time, his mother says. Hsiao-Kang pisses in bags and lackadaisically sells watches. Shiang-chyi enters the game at this point. They meet when she wants to buy a watch and he sells watches and she says she is moving to Paris and he says ok. They may have coalesced greatly but she went to Paris, France and he doesn't live there. He lives in Taipei and the time there is not the…
I feel like I've read so much about this film before that adding anything new might be impossible. Having become a fan of Tsai Ming-liang over the last year, and having discussed him with my friend Basil, I spent some time reading up on him and this film in particular, in part because it came up in my Letterboxd feed a few times by chance. The two things that stayed with me while I watched it were Basil's mentioning the father as a metaphor for Taiwan, and an odd thing from Roger Ebert's review. In his review, he speculates that the graveyard Jean-Pierre Leaud is sitting in in the film is where Francois Truffaut is buried, and the idea of…
Loneliness as an all-consuming omnipresent being. The acts of communicating feelings and forging meaningful relationships are akin to ghostowns. Actions are eccentric, words are deficient. Loss - be it a death, or someone's temporary departure to another land - is coped through silence and obsessive tendencies. Whether an impossible quest to change the collective time of a city, or in the search of a reincarnated soul in any living being, estrangement borders on insanity in this friendless realm; all of it concluding in the most perplexing ending I have seen. The perennially lonesome Taipei of Tsai Ming-liang has never been lonelier.
***One of the best 150 films I have ever seen.***
Images speak for themselves in Tsai's invigorating cinematic oeuvre. Ni na bian ji dian is almost as symbolic as a modern Lynch masterpiece; Taiwan is shown through a low-class scope where silence plays the most important role in the characters' inner desperation. Life is an enormous chess board: the game is unpredictable and there are several ways in which you can win, but half of the circumstances are out of your control. Besides, the game is too short. Human emotions felt to their most extreme boundaries become, ultimately, in the most intense escapism available. The loneliness of completely separate individuals, both in the physical and spiritual levels, is connected regardless of kilometric distance.
100/100
Time for sale
Time for sale
Time for sale
Left hanging by the thinnest thread. Why does privation linger so pervasively? Phone calls left unanswered; silences left unspoken; promises left unbroken. Time that is kept on supposedly unbreakable pieces is subject to the whims life procures. We discover that clocks and watches do not provide shelter from dark shadows cast down by the hands of destiny; lonesome in the night, awaiting arrivals that it seems may never emerge, and returns which shall not manifest. But that thread stretches far: alone and bereft in Taiwan, isolated and desultory in France—a life becomes lives; junctures become singular, closer than ever metaphysically, though miles away materially. You can feel it. Looking within you…
9:04am
you wake up groggy and not wanting to open your eyes. your first thought is how comfortable your pillow is. your second thought is how hard the day is going to be to get through.
10:45am
you’ve managed to pull yourself away from the comfort of sleep to make some food. you feed your fish too. you talk to him for a while and it makes you feel a little bit less alone.
12:04pm
work is normal today because every day is the same. selling watches to countless, nameless faces and you don’t care. except this one face stands out from the rest. she takes the watch from your wrist and now you can’t get it out of your…
loneliness knows no timezones. Taipei and Paris are interlocked in such a melancholic manner in What Time Is It There, Ming-liang Tsai's heartbreaking tributes to his father, as well as to French cinema that has obviously played an indelible role in his filmmaking mastery.
This is a wittily written story about mourning, both for the living and the dead, and the crazy length people would go to simply to ease the pain. Lee Kang-sheng is troubled by his newly deceased father, and a female customer who he may never meet again, and a bizarre, multiple-perspective journey starts from there. It's both hilarious and heartwrenching to watch this tormented Taiwanese family grieving in their own unique, borderline obsessive ways, and the…
ceremony becomes a way to demarcate change and create a repetitive experience of history -- you celebrate a holiday that your ancestors did, and in that repeating, you bridge the temporal gap between yourself and a world which is always slipping into discontinuity, into death. the cinema itself, as with all artforms, carries with it a ceremonial essence -- through spending time with a film, one becomes acquainted with the singular qualities of a time that is not their own, sees people who may look and act like real people, but who invariably perform the same tasks over and over -- lighting cigarettes, going to cafes, mourning. movie people are just like us, but a vertical slice of us, frozen…
"Is that you coming back to see me?"
Life is built on a series of rituals. We all have them, whether we would willingly share them or not. Street merchant Hsiao-kang (Lee Kang-sheng) has a few, but the most intense one is a compulsive need to switch all the watches and clocks he can find - even on the sides of buildings - to Paris time, driven by his obsession with a customer he met only once, Shiang-chyi (Shiang-chyi Chen). She convinced him to sell her his watch and gave him a cake along with the cash; that gesture was like a key turning a lock inside his heart. It changed him.
We simultaneously follow Shiang-chyi's solitary vacation in France…
What Time Is It There? is a film about missed connections, of how people can neglect the time they spend together before being swallowed by regret once they realize they never will again. Ostensibly it's also one on loneliness, alienation, loss, and the past, and by framing it in his incredibly-formalist (but warm) approach Tsai Ming-liang is able to truly push those themes further.
Hsiao-kang is a street vendor who sells watches, and his father has recently passed away. He's affected by this loss but able to move on, something his mother hasn't yet realized as she spends her time and energy reincarnating her late husband. This isn't literal of course, though in a sense it may as well be;…
79/100
Third viewing (first since 2002), no change. I don't know what's preventing Tsai's films from getting a Blu-ray release, from Criterion or some other auteur-lovin' outfit, but having to revisit this on my shitty windowboxed Wellspring dvd was not what you'd call ideal. What struck me most strongly this time was the beautifully economical way that Tsai depicts consternation when traveling abroad, e.g. a Taiwanese woman standing in a very crowded Parisian Métro car, failing to comprehend the announcement that the train's being taken out of service, and briefly, gratefully taking a seat during the exodus before realizing that everyone is disembarking and then hurrying after them, still visibly unsure of what's going on. Tsai doesn't underline any aspect…
